[1]BRENTWOOD, Tenn. (BP) – “Women marry,” was reportedly her father’s response when missionary and Bible translator Katharine “Katy” Barnwell told him she wanted to enroll in university in 1950s London.
But as her father relented, Barnwell defied convention. She studied linguistics and eventually forged a path to Nigeria where more than 520 languages are spoken. There, she devised a method of Bible translation that her biographer Jordan K. Monson told Baptist Press has led more people to Jesus than the crusades of the late Billy Graham.
“Lifeway (Research) estimates that Billy Graham had somewhere between 2.2 (million) and 3 million people in his entire life’s ministry become Christians,” Monson said. “Now, of course, that’s incredible, those are incredible numbers. That’s like a small state in the United States that became Christians under his influence.”
To reach his comparative conclusion, he took into consideration that Barnwell’s translation methods are used in the Jesus Film project, which he said she rewrote “from the ground up.”
“And since she did that, 400 million people have become Christians after a viewing of the Jesus Film. And that was her side gig. That wasn’t even her main career,” Monson said. “So when you compare that to Billy Graham’s, let’s say 3 million, we’re looking at sometimes, somewhere around 100 or more times the influence in terms of global conversions or global people becoming Christians.”
[2]But for Monson, who chronicles Barnwell’s work in the newly released B&H Publishing book, “Katherine Barnwell: How One Woman Revolutionized Modern Missions,” her influence doesn’t stop there.
Barnwell, now 86 and working remotely from her home in London, exudes humility. How does it feel to be featured in a biography?
“Rather embarrassing!” she emailed Baptist Press, exclamation included. But she considered Monson kind.
He “wrote about what was achieved, rather than the failures – the times when I missed an opportunity, or remained silent when I should have spoken up.”
At this stage of life, she points to teamwork as having been the greatest goal of her ministry.
“Recognizing that we need to work together as a team, sharing talents and abilities, trying to help others develop their gifts and abilities, working in partnership with friends of all nationalities and backgrounds,” she told Baptist Press.
She’s not done. From her home computer, she’s working with Mbembe translators in Southeast Nigeria, where she first began on the mission field with the Mbembe Language Project, interacting with local church leaders, training and encouraging translators.
Before she left for the mission field, she attended All Souls Langham Place, pastored by John Stott, and today attends the non-denominational Goring Free Church in Thames Valley, which has supported her throughout her ministry.
She longs for a time “when people of every language will have at least some, then more, Scripture in their own language.”
Monson tells Barnwell’s story of developing a translation method that valued and appreciated the knowledge and capabilities of the local populations she served, beginning in southeastern Nigeria.
“So she was really the one that opened up that gate to teach people how to see their own language more linguistically and from a translation sort of methodology that they would be able to translate Scripture faithfully into their own language,” Monson told Baptist Press. He compares it to the apostle Paul’s way of church planting on his missionary journeys, establishing churches, training local leaders who spoke the languages and knew the culture, and moving on.
Similar to Paul, Barnwell endured difficulties and trials on the mission field as she worked to translate the Bible.
“After half a century in missions, Katharine Barnwell was no stranger to peril. Six times she was robbed at gunpoint, twice stormed by armed robbers. She fled a civil war on foot and upriver without documentation,” Monson wrote in his book. On one occasion, she and a team of translators were robbed of several laptops at gunpoint by a group of marauders in Nigeria. “She endured constant threat from terrorists and constant danger from malaria. She was known to forego food and sleep so that others might eat and have a warm bed.”
When Monson considers Barnwell’s influence, he looks beyond her translation work on the Jesus Film project to Bible translations completed within the last four decades or so.
“Then if you were to go to any printed or recorded sort of mp3 Bible in the world that has either been partially or fully completed in the last 30 or 40 years,” he told Baptist Press, “virtually all of those are being done according to her training, her methods, her teaching, her disciples. And this is what makes her one of the most influential missionaries or Christians in all of history.”
As the global church shares the Gospel, they’re using Bibles and Scripture translated by methods developed by Barnwell, Monson said.
“So in terms of just numbers of people who say they’re Christians,” he said, “(she) may be well over a hundred times more influential than Billy Graham.”
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